Really Great Site Volume 101 Thursday, February 23,2023

THE BLACK DAHLIA UNSOLVED CASE

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a mother taking her child for a walk in a Los Angeles neighborhood stumbled upon a gruesome sight: the body of a young naked
woman sliced clean in half at the waist.
The body was just a few feet from the sidewalk and posed in such a way that the mother reportedly thought it was a mannequin at first glance.
Despite the extensive mutilation and cuts on the body, there wasn’t a drop of blood at the scene, indicating that the young woman had been killed elsewhere.
The ensuing investigation was led by the L.A. Police Department. The FBI was asked to help, and it quickly identified the body—just 56 minutes, in fact, after getting
blurred fingerprints via “Soundphoto” (a primitive fax machine used by news services) from Los Angeles.
The young woman turned out to be a 22-year-old Hollywood hopeful named Elizabeth Short—later dubbed the “Black Dahlia” by the press for her rumored penchant
for sheer black clothes and for the Blue Dahlia movie out at that time.
Short’s prints actually appeared twice in the FBI’s massive collection (more than 100 million were on file at the time).
First, she had applied for a job as a clerk at the commissary of the Army’s Camp Cooke in California in January 1943.
Second, she had been arrested by the Santa Barbara police for underage drinking seven months later. The Bureau also had her “mug shot” in its files and provided it to
the press.
In support of L.A. police, the FBI ran records checks on potential suspects and conducted interviews across the nation.
Based on early suspicions that the murderer may have had skills in dissection because the body was so cleanly cut, agents were also asked to check out a group of
students at the University of Southern California Medical School.
And, in a tantalizing potential break in the case, the Bureau searched for a match to fingerprints found on an anonymous letter that may have been sent to authorities
by the killer, but the prints weren’t in FBI files.
Who killed the Black Dahlia and why? It’s a mystery.
The murderer has never been found, and given how much time has passed, probably never will be.
The legend grows…
Really Great Site Volume 101 Thursday, February 23,2023

The murders were the subject of intense investigation and media coverage,
particularly because of the killer’s taunting letters to newspapers and phone calls
to police. His letters, sent from 1969 to 1974, were signed with a symbol resembling
the crosshairs of a gunsight and typically began with the phrase, “this is the Zodiac
speaking.” Included among the letters were four ciphers or cryptograms, the first
of which was sent in three parts to three Bay Area newspapers in July 1969.
Known as the “408 cipher” for the number of characters it contained, it was soon
decoded by a pair of private citizens. Its message stated in part that, “I like killing
people because it is so much fun.” Another cipher, the “340 cipher,” mailed to the
San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969, was finally decoded in 2020 by a
team of three amateur code breakers; its message began, “I hope you are having
lots of fun in trying to catch me.”

Much remains mysterious about the Zodiac case, not least the issue of when the
crimes stopped. Crime writer Robert Graysmith argued that the Zodiac killer
remained active through the 1980s and murdered dozens more people, though
this view is controversial. During the 1990s several investigators claimed to have
identified the Zodiac killer; the suspect most often cited was Arthur Leigh Allen
(1933–92), a Vallejo, California, schoolteacher who had been institutionalized in
1975 for child molestation, though his identification with the Zodiac killer has
never been substantiated.
Really Great Site Volume 101 Thursday, February 23,2023

The Zodiac Killer

Zodiac killer, unidentified American serial killer who is believed to
have murdered at least five people in northern California between
1968 and 1969. An earlier murder, the stabbing death of an 18-year-
old college student in Riverside, California in 1966, is also sometimes
attributed to the Zodiac killer. The case inspired the influential 1971
action film Dirty Harry, which starred Clint Eastwood, and it was the
subject of the critically acclaimed David Fincher dramatic film
Zodiac (2007).
In 1968 a teenage couple was shot to death near their car in a remote
area north of San Francisco; one year later another couple was
attacked in similar circumstances, though the male victim survived.
After the 1969 attack, the killer phoned police to alert them to the
crime and to take responsibility for the 1968 murders. Later that year
the Zodiac killer attacked another young couple, though once again
the male survived. The last known victim, a taxi driver, was shot in
October 1969.
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